this is your rig on sugarcubes

Posts Tagged surface pro

I’ve been working on a game in my spare time, which has led me to look for easy ways to create pixel art. So far my running favorite is grafx2, which is one of the few that runs almost perfectly with pen and touch (many pixel editors don’t like the newfangled bits of Windows 8).

However, grafx2 has a few oddities, which has kept pushing me on my search. Eventually I came across the SDL site after a loooong time not looking at it, and discovered that v2.0 has finally been released. It’s a modern update, and I figured I might have a go at writing a very simple pixel art editor in all the spare time I don’t have.

Anyway, since I want to edit the art on my Surface Pro, I downloaded the latest version of MinGW and set about building a testbed using SDL 2.0. First few things went well, but then it crashed when I attempted to create an accelerated SDL_Renderer.

The culprit seems to be the Intel Graphics driver that’s on the Surface Pro by default. After installing the new version from this link, I’m able to create the accelerated renderer and the program does not crash.

If you’re wondering if your own crashes are related, and they occur around program startup or just after the first real window has been opened, look in the crash log for mentions of ig7icd32.dll — that’s part of the Intel driver.

Interestingly, this update has also made Analogue: A Hate Story work on my Surface Pro again! And I’ve heard that this fixes the crash on startup experienced by some players of FTL.